Good Mom on Paper

Call for Submissions

Good Mom On Paper is a collection of essays that will thoughtfully explore the fraught, beautiful, painful, and complicated relationship between the creative process and motherhood. The book will gather multiple viewpoints from a wide variety of diverse writers and thinkers, examining what systems are in place that prevent mothers from personal expression and success, looking at what systems nurture them, and asking how we can better support and celebrate mothers’ creative work.

Editors Jen Sookfong Lee and Stacey May Fowles (Whatever Gets You Through) are looking for pitches (no more than 500 words) or complete essays (approximately 2,000 to 5,000 words in length) on the tenuous or tight connection between creativity and motherhood. How does motherhood disrupt the creative process? How does it enhance it? Do children ultimately halt or expand our ability to produce art and promote it—literary, or otherwise? How does the creative world accommodate mothers, if at all?

Honest and intimate, critical, and hopeful, this book won’t shy away from the messy, unpopular, controversial feelings or challenging ideas than come along with the “hardest job in the world.” In having these difficult conversations, Good Mom On Paper aims to support and offer solace to mothers struggling with the deep, simultaneous devotion that both their art and their children demand.

We’re looking for essays from self-identified mothers of all kinds, at all stages of life, career, and parenting, and who are interested in exploring motherhood and art creation in all its many incarnations, both positive and negative. Please send essay pitches (up to 500 words) by midnight December 15th, 2020 to goodmomonpaper@bookhugpress.ca. Finished pieces (2,000 to 5,0000 words) will also be accepted until February 15, 2021. If your essay is accepted for publication you will receive a $200 honorarium and two copies of the finished book. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch.